That's right, Mr. Meader- don't look here for thoze rum0rz...

The $14 cost of the A5 is not reflecting the huge R&D costs that went into designing the chip while the cost of the intel chip has the R&D baked into its price. That said - it's still a whopping diference.

As for the "50 times performance in two years" roadmap - I'll believe it when it's more than speculation and/or just a FWB (acronym of the day - Fanboy's Wet Dream).

There are drawbacks to any platform change. PPC to Intel was one of the best executed I've seen but others were not so flash.

Since this seems to be moving from rumour to reality let's discuss it in a new thread.

Quote
johnny k
Good to have another contributor (again).

[...] And as interesting, which way Apple will take it. Smaller battery seems potentially more interesting than extending laptop life between charges.

Apple may shrink the battery too (almost certainly) but they haven't hit the upper requirement yet IMO for charge-life. When a globe-trotting exec can fly anywhere from anywhere (reasonably, that is; Reno is excluded from source OR destination) and not be flat dead, that will be good. (So I expect the "golden ticket" to be around 18h/24h of average use.)

Why not aim for a week?

This is probably a small part of it (no pun intended), but wouldn't any ARM chip also require a pretty hefty GPU, as opposed to Intel's (not fantastic, but extant) integrated GPUs? How would that affect size, heat, cost? And are any GPUs compatible with ARM architecture?

ddt

Tony,

I'm not sure if you're serious or not. I doubt a week is realistic in a "laptop". I picked my timeframes from the longer flight times for worldly cities (NY to Sydney, f.ex.). I know many airlines have power adapters and so forth now, but many may not still (or perhaps it was just me and Rickshaw Airlines I took to Singapore a few years back).

ddt,

If there's not a part right now, expect there to be by the time a laptop moves over.

nVidia's got an ARM-compatible GPU with the Tegra, I believe. Here are some search results, no time for more intensive search now.

Jen-Hsun Huang, president and chief executive officer at Nvidia, announced in his keynote address that Nvidia was indeed working on a processor that would eventually be integrated with its graphics co-processors. The ARM-happy effort is known Known as "Project Denver".

http://www.channelregister.co.uk/2011/01/05/nvidia_arm_pc_server_chip/


News of the Tegra 2 perked up many an ear. Not only was this dual core Cortex A9 processor running at 1 GHz, but it also featured an NVIDIA designed graphics processor integrated on the die itself. NVIDIA has been fairly mum on the topic of the exact details of the graphics portion, but from all indications this appears to be a pretty hefty part.

http://www.pcper.com/reviews/Processors/NVIDIA-ARM-Tegra-3-and-Beyond?aid=1072

Apple's A series have the integrated GPU.

Samsung WebOS?

Yeah, something's going on.

The Palm Eurostore now says that they no longer expect to be getting ANY stock of the Pre 3.

Snow Leopard support for some features of iCloud in 10.6.9.

Now there are rumors that HP might spin-off the WebOS business.

Does that mean that Palm will become an independent company again?

If true, it could hardly be a surprise. Look at their history:

Founded in 1992 as an independent company.
Bought by USRobotics in 1995.
Became a subsidiary of 3Com in 1997 when they bought USR.
Spun off as an independent company again in 2000.
Split itself in two in 2003 when the hardware division merged with Handspring to create PalmOne.
Bought back the rights to the Palm name in 2005 as its other half moved on to other business when it was acquired by ACCESS.
Acquired by HP in 2010.
HP stopped using the Palm brand in early 2011.

Hot potato, don't pick it up-pick it up-pick it up-pick it up...

Don't forget to include all the times Apple tried to buy the company, but was refused.

I'd want their patents, even without WebOS. I miss my Palm V and Palm VII, not to mention my Cliés.

My first smartphone was a Samsung SPH-I300 running PalmOS.

Wow, sexy hardware!

Yep, Tim Cook is going to run the company JUST like Steve did.

DPBD: Comments make me think that this might be some kind of viral marketing that has nothing to do with Apple. Still, I'm leaving the link here in case it's legit.

HTC WebOS?

The OS itself wouldn't be of much value to HTC unless Palm's patent portfolio came along with it... and I suspect HP will want to hold onto that.

It'd be interesting to see what would happen with it, though. I like HTC's hardware. My current and previous devices were made by them (Nexus One and MyTouch 4G).